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from a pure economic perspective (which is the slant imposed by "pay gap"), a core piece of the problem is that household care (as a broader category that inclu

from a pure economic perspective (which is the slant imposed by "pay gap"), a core piece of the problem is that household care (as a broader category that includes child care) is not adequately specified and appropriately valued monetarily. if household management was a good to be bought and sold, we could discover its price curve through market mechanisms. since women do more house work, we would be able to appropriately account for that gap. but do we want a society where household care is simply another market good?

weberc2 9y ago
What is meant by "is not adequately specified and not appropriately valued monetarily"? My question isn't meant to sound skeptical, I'm genuinely curious.
- clairity 9y ago
  i meant that we don't buy and sell it in the ways we would buy and sell plumbing services, for example. we don't have a professional organization that sets standards and issues credentials. we can't compare the quality of one provider against another. there isn't a market to buy and sell household care, with the concomitant prices that implies. but the real question is, would we want to?
  - weberc2 9y ago
    Presumably we don't do these things because the market indicates that they aren't valuable, right? In other words, we don't do them because we don't want to do them, or at least we lack the ability to do them at a price that is better than doing it ourselves? Also, we do pay some people for some of these tasks--childcare, for example. And increasingly I think we're seeing more penetration by the market--grocery shopping and other direct-to-home services. Lastly, can you clarify how this pertains to the conversation about the gender wage gap?
    - clairity 9y ago
      i think we don't do those things, not because they're not valuable--in fact, we've shown they're immensely valuable by dedicaitng whole groups of people for decades of their lives to the task--but because patriarchal social structures benefit from the asymmetry in value placement. if only men can create value, they hold power. we've been moving towards a system where power is shared between men and women. that has benefits but also tradeoffs (e.g., men can't monopolize power as before). as the system moves in that direction, things like value placement necessarily shift along with it (as you point out). what we're conversing about here is the grapplings we face along that shift as we negotiate what the new equilibrium will be. the gender wage gap can then be seen as a measure of what that equilibrium is. that's my take on it, at least. =)
      - weberc2 9y ago
        > not because they're not valuable It's not because they aren't valuable; they're just not more valuable than our leisure time (for the majority of people). Of course, even this varies--for example, outsourced child care is very popular. > patriarchal social structures benefit from the asymmetry in value placement. if only men can create value, they hold power. I don't think the patriarchy/power theory is a particularly good one. Men have never behaved as a social class nor monopolized social power. While it's true that men are overrepresented at the very top of almost every society, it's also true that men are overrepresented at the very bottom of almost every society. Theories of patriarchy don't predict this anywhere at any time, much less in almost every human society that has ever existed on the planet. I don't know what the right answer is, but it's very likely that for hundreds of thousands of years, a society's survival has depended on reproductive success where men are expendable and women are crucial. As such, men are left to do the risky work while women added social value in low risk (but important!) areas of life like tending home and family. These dynamics incentivize risk taking and competition among men, which explains men disproportionately occupying the tops and bottoms of every society. Working outside the home has only been the less risky occupation in the last hundred years or so, and our society is still adapting to the change. This is probably wrong on some of the particulars but right in general.
closeparen 9y ago
Sure it is: the cost of day care. There is a very clear economic indicator for whether you should have a one- or two-income household: after subtracting childcare costs, do you still come out ahead?
- clairity 9y ago
  yes, that's true but also part of what i meant by underspecified. childcare is part of the equation and is one way we're monetizing household management. but there's more to it.
tomp 9y ago
> household care [...] is not [...] appropriately valued monetarily > since women do more house work What if it is valued appropriately? E.g. (1) I don't value the housework you do at all, nor does pretty much anyone else in the society... sure, you can put a $ value on e.g. cleaning (hiring a cleaning service) or cooking (hiring a chef), but it won't be clean to your standard and it won't be your favourite food; (2) it's possible, and in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience quite likely, than women value household care more than men - so they want to do more of it. Of course, not everybody, but even on average that could have a significant effect.
- UncleMeat 9y ago
  But do you think this effect could be culturally formed? That would still make it worth tackling.
  - tomp 9y ago
    > That would still make it worth tackling. Why? In my opinion, only if you can replace it with something better... E.g. speaking English is culturally formed, but so what? I don't have kids yet, but I've thought a lot about how to raise any future children I might (well, want to) have. My current thinking is that I will raise them differently, boys and girls, according to what I see the most probably outcome (e.g. for each to be heterosexual). Sure, I might turn out to be wrong, but (1) you can't avoid putting some preconceptions in a child's mind (after all, that's what "raising children" means), and (2) as long as they can consciously choose a different path (e.g. "I'm actually gay, I'll optimize my life for that") I think that's mean-variance optimized choice. It's like, well your kid could be Mozart but you screwed them completely because you taught them guitar, stupid you... but then, there's no way you could have known, and a guitar is probably still better than complete lack of music, so it's a good choice overall.
- clairity 9y ago
  so what women want doesn't have value?
malvosenior 9y ago
How are they not valued? A stay at home mom lives the same lifestyle as the husband that works (and vice versa for stay at home dads). They live in the same house, eat the same food, go on the same vacations... If you're doing those things for free then you're implicitly being paid equal to the other partner who's living the same lifestyle.
solidsnack9000 9y ago
Although there is not a market for household care, one can show that there are substantial transfers involved when one partner stays at home. As an earlier commenter noted, a partner who stays at home enjoys the use of many of the same things -- all the property -- and has all of their own consumption covered. Working backwards from consumption would allow us to discover the nominal price of housework.

weberc2 9y ago

What is meant by "is not adequately specified and not appropriately valued monetarily"? My question isn't meant to sound skeptical, I'm genuinely curious.

clairity 9y ago
i meant that we don't buy and sell it in the ways we would buy and sell plumbing services, for example. we don't have a professional organization that sets standards and issues credentials. we can't compare the quality of one provider against another. there isn't a market to buy and sell household care, with the concomitant prices that implies. but the real question is, would we want to?
- weberc2 9y ago
  Presumably we don't do these things because the market indicates that they aren't valuable, right? In other words, we don't do them because we don't want to do them, or at least we lack the ability to do them at a price that is better than doing it ourselves? Also, we do pay some people for some of these tasks--childcare, for example. And increasingly I think we're seeing more penetration by the market--grocery shopping and other direct-to-home services. Lastly, can you clarify how this pertains to the conversation about the gender wage gap?
  - clairity 9y ago
    i think we don't do those things, not because they're not valuable--in fact, we've shown they're immensely valuable by dedicaitng whole groups of people for decades of their lives to the task--but because patriarchal social structures benefit from the asymmetry in value placement. if only men can create value, they hold power. we've been moving towards a system where power is shared between men and women. that has benefits but also tradeoffs (e.g., men can't monopolize power as before). as the system moves in that direction, things like value placement necessarily shift along with it (as you point out). what we're conversing about here is the grapplings we face along that shift as we negotiate what the new equilibrium will be. the gender wage gap can then be seen as a measure of what that equilibrium is. that's my take on it, at least. =)
    - weberc2 9y ago
      > not because they're not valuable It's not because they aren't valuable; they're just not more valuable than our leisure time (for the majority of people). Of course, even this varies--for example, outsourced child care is very popular. > patriarchal social structures benefit from the asymmetry in value placement. if only men can create value, they hold power. I don't think the patriarchy/power theory is a particularly good one. Men have never behaved as a social class nor monopolized social power. While it's true that men are overrepresented at the very top of almost every society, it's also true that men are overrepresented at the very bottom of almost every society. Theories of patriarchy don't predict this anywhere at any time, much less in almost every human society that has ever existed on the planet. I don't know what the right answer is, but it's very likely that for hundreds of thousands of years, a society's survival has depended on reproductive success where men are expendable and women are crucial. As such, men are left to do the risky work while women added social value in low risk (but important!) areas of life like tending home and family. These dynamics incentivize risk taking and competition among men, which explains men disproportionately occupying the tops and bottoms of every society. Working outside the home has only been the less risky occupation in the last hundred years or so, and our society is still adapting to the change. This is probably wrong on some of the particulars but right in general.

closeparen 9y ago

Sure it is: the cost of day care. There is a very clear economic indicator for whether you should have a one- or two-income household: after subtracting childcare costs, do you still come out ahead?

clairity 9y ago
yes, that's true but also part of what i meant by underspecified. childcare is part of the equation and is one way we're monetizing household management. but there's more to it.

tomp 9y ago

> household care [...] is not [...] appropriately valued monetarily > since women do more house work What if it is valued appropriately? E.g. (1) I don't value the housework you do at all, nor does pretty much anyone else in the society... sure, you can put a $ value on e.g. cleaning (hiring a cleaning service) or cooking (hiring a chef), but it won't be clean to your standard and it won't be your favourite food; (2) it's possible, and in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience quite likely, than women value household care more than men - so they want to do more of it. Of course, not everybody, but even on average that could have a significant effect.

UncleMeat 9y ago
But do you think this effect could be culturally formed? That would still make it worth tackling.
- tomp 9y ago
  > That would still make it worth tackling. Why? In my opinion, only if you can replace it with something better... E.g. speaking English is culturally formed, but so what? I don't have kids yet, but I've thought a lot about how to raise any future children I might (well, want to) have. My current thinking is that I will raise them differently, boys and girls, according to what I see the most probably outcome (e.g. for each to be heterosexual). Sure, I might turn out to be wrong, but (1) you can't avoid putting some preconceptions in a child's mind (after all, that's what "raising children" means), and (2) as long as they can consciously choose a different path (e.g. "I'm actually gay, I'll optimize my life for that") I think that's mean-variance optimized choice. It's like, well your kid could be Mozart but you screwed them completely because you taught them guitar, stupid you... but then, there's no way you could have known, and a guitar is probably still better than complete lack of music, so it's a good choice overall.
clairity 9y ago
so what women want doesn't have value?

malvosenior 9y ago

How are they not valued? A stay at home mom lives the same lifestyle as the husband that works (and vice versa for stay at home dads). They live in the same house, eat the same food, go on the same vacations... If you're doing those things for free then you're implicitly being paid equal to the other partner who's living the same lifestyle.

solidsnack9000 9y ago

Although there is not a market for household care, one can show that there are substantial transfers involved when one partner stays at home. As an earlier commenter noted, a partner who stays at home enjoys the use of many of the same things -- all the property -- and has all of their own consumption covered. Working backwards from consumption would allow us to discover the nominal price of housework.